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With China in the news on so many fronts, I was prompted to check out some of the mutual funds that are categorized as “China funds.” Whoa! Some have gained almost 40 percent during the past 12 months. It’s clearly an economy that is growing faster than ours, and we sell a lot of products to them — starting with cars whereby General Motors sells more in that country than it sells domestically.

Like the search for the perpetual motion machine, the money management business never ceases in its effort to invent what could be a perennial winner in both rising and falling markets. Not that long ago, a possible answer was the notion of a “go-anywhere” fund — a mutual fund that would make no pretense of representing a specific investment style (e.g.

Anticipating the day when my job income stops and I have to depend on investments and retirement accounts for income is NOT something I’m suited for given my background and temperament. I’m always worried about what can go wrong, and I like to have “back-up.” This came up in a discussion with my wife (a retired licensed therapist) when she caught me reading Bob Rotella’s book “Golf is Not a Game of Perfect” — for the umpteenth time.

To create some investment excitement, and to help the greeting card industry, let’s designate something called “Losers’ Week.” This would be a week set aside to celebrate the fact that yesterday’s perennial fund losers have finally begun to stir. We may soon be disappointed once again as we enter what is traditionally the “summer doldrums” of a seasonally weakening stock market, but for the moment, we have something to be happy about if we’ve been patiently holding, say, energy, precious metals or China funds — to pick a few examples.

“Secular stagnation” is meant to describe a market-based economy that experiences slow growth or no growth. Secular is used to imply a long-term condition as opposed to the cyclical variety with which we usually deal.

Professional bond investors are canaries in the mine shaft when it comes to predicting long-term future movement in the economy. Unlike economists or pundits, bond traders are playing with real money. Long-term bets on the future of interest rates can move today’s bond values up or down significantly — prices drop if market interest rates rise and prices rise if market interest rates drop — like a rope over a pulley. Added to this is the fact that bond investments are purchased with borrowed money to a greater extent than stocks, and leverage, of course, can work both ways.

Your Fitbit or similar monitor will illustrate that night after night, your deep sleep lasts for almost exactly the first four hours. That’s the sleep you really need. Time spent tossing and turning after that is important primarily to “work out the conflicts in your life.” Those who have no conflicts, in theory, only need the first four hours of sleep. When those four hours are up, those who are “conflict-free” reportedly bound out of bed and start, well, tweeting in some cases.

A major component of stock market gains in recent years is attributable to stock buybacks. Companies have been using their historically huge hoards of cash to purchase their own shares on the market and retire them. This reduces the total number of outstanding shares representing a company’s value, so the value per share increases. It’s a gift to stockholders in lieu of dividends.

Maintaining a retirement plan for your employees is no easy task. At various points during the year, employers and HR departments field participant questions, help with enrollments, deliver notices and statements, and participate in the distribution process. However, an additional responsibility, and one of the most important, is the collection of data that is used for compliance testing and government reporting. Learn more by selecting the Newsletter attachment below...

Driving to work and tuned to my favorite jazz station, I heard Cole Porter’s song, “Just One of Those Things.” I thought about my 45th wedding anniversary, which was on Saturday, as the song’s lyrics included the stanza, “We’d have been aware that our love affair — was too hot not to cool down …”